Will young Mitt hurt candidate Mitt?

When a report alleging Mitt Romney engaged in a high-school incident that left a gay student “terrified” got traction Thursday, his campaign moved to quell the flames — putting the candidate on radio to offer a broad-based apology for youthful “hijinks and pranks” — and offering up other classmates to fill in a different picture of Young Mitt.

The worry for the Romney campaign is whether it will help to permanently change the picture of Candidate Mitt.

Text Size

-

+

reset

The details of The Washington Post piece are vivid: that 48 years ago in high school, Romney led a group of teens to physically hold down and clip the hair of a young man who was believed at the time to be gay, and who came out as an adult.

If accurately described, the incident would be considered bullying in an era in which there are now national campaigns against such activity.

Romneyland and Republicans have pushed back hard on the piece, for accuracy and for fairness. They argue that decades-old news is either irrelevant to the presidency, or unfairly applied. President Barack Obama, they note, wrote in “Dreams From My Father” about drug use, dog meat and shoving a girl in middle school because she expressed interest in him.

But political strategists say the danger to Romney is that the details of the story — portraying a young Romney as mean-spirited, and even cruel — run so counter to the image he wants to project as a squeaky clean, fundamentally decent family man that they could alter the perception of a public that’s just getting to know him. And the whole episode contains a cautionary tale.

“I don’t think this story in the end is consequential to Mitt Romney’s electability,” said Florida-based Republican operative Rick Wilson, who isn’t working for Romney.

“However, it should be a lesson for the campaign that they should be mindful and aware that they need to know their candidate’s history. If they don’t know their candidate’s history enough, they don’t know the positive and they’re unable to defend the negative.”

Wilson pointed to the fact that for the most part, Obama’s team used what could have been a damaging personal biography to his advantage in the 2008 race.

Obama’s camp defended the so-called negative brilliantly, Wilson said, by turning a story of “dope smoking” and other elements of his youth into an uplifting, aspirational picture. Romney’s campaign should be doing more, he said, to fill out his biography instead of having it painted on a blank canvas for them.

“The adult narrative of Romney’s life” is a positive one, Wilson said. “It would benefit them to reintroduce some of those things.”

Regardless of its ultimate impact, the story broke through the noisy news cycle, and is now into its second day, even as Romney tries to refocus on the economy. It’s an instance of a defining biographical detail breaking through that feeds into an existing narrative pushed by rivals, about intolerance toward gay people — recalling Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and the Vietnam draft; John Kerry’s questioned Vietnam decorations; Sarah Palin’s moose-hunting; and even John Edwards’s $400 haircuts.

Now, the only question left is how much damage this bit of biography about a still-undefined national candidate will cause.

Old news.....The family of the deceased man that Mitt supposedly bullied never heard their brother talk about the story and is alleging that the WAPO got the facts all wrong. Nothing but a drve by hit piece by the liberal media.

Romney has more moral character than the entire Socialist/Democrat universe. For current reference, refer to John Edwards -- 2004 VP candidate.......I could list dozens of other scum (including their MSM collaborators) -- but no need.

Wow, so we haven't heard one peep out of the media over Obama's college grades, transcripts, or how on earth he went from occidental whatever college to Harvard. Yet they are hard at work on 50 year old stories from Romney's high school years. Even if this story is true, and seems pretty much hearsay to me, he was still a child when this happened. It'd be like trying to harp on Obama for pushing that little girl as a child. You don't judge an adult off the actions of their childhood, that's totally unfair. The right has never gone there on Obama, but it's clear the left and their media allies are going to get awfully dirty this time around.

Romneyland and Republicans have pushed back hard on the piece, for accuracy and for fairness. They argue that decades-old news is either irrelevant to the presidency, or unfairly applied. President Obama, they note, wrote in “Dreams from my Father” about drug use,

Drug use is a victimless crime.

Being able to admit to the obvious such as an act many people have done when they were younger is a rare show of character for a politician.

Leading a homophobic posse in an attack on a lone boy because he is presumed gay is not a victimless crime.

And pretending you can’t remember doing it is more like what we expect from a politician.

Please for God sake (Morman's) do not blame Romney for forgetting to whom he has bullied when he was 18 years old because like many thousands Americans in his age also do not remember to whom and to how many they have bullied, insulted, dehumanized and sent to the mental wards or grave yards. Our dark history of that period is very well written in volumes. Shockingly, we have not only bullied but nuked them and roasted them in millions around the globe.

I think now that Romney has basically survived "Bullygate," it's time for him to play the Mormon card. It's going to come up (and in a really negative way) - so he might as well get out there and start talking about his Mormon faith that he has so passionately embraced in the past but basically ignored since running for President. http://mankabros.com/blogs/cha...

He ate dog, bullied a young girl, smoked pot and cocaine enthusiastically, was a drunk and walked around in a daze for his last two years of high school. All this from his own book (Dreams of my Fathers). And now the guy is the Preezy of the United Steezy so I'm gonna go out on a limb and say that an event that may or may not have happened 48 years ago with a youthful Romney is going to have absolutely no effect on the race for POTUS 2012.

That is, of course, unless you're a liberal or in the media. Which in that case means little because you were never going to vote for or support the guy to begin with.